Glyceride

[cyberghostface]

This is a fairly infamous story from Junji Ito (at least among his American fans) for reasons that will become clear to you as you read it. It's gross. Very gross.

Read from right to left as usual.



Yui's house is a "gloomy mess"; her father runs a barbecue shop on the first floor and due to the poor ventilation the place is dripping with grease.





She gradually becomes aware of the amount of oil in the air; "saturation level" being the level of density.

Her brother eventually hits puberty and is covered in pimples. As such he is frequently picked on in school, and becomes resentful of his home life. He holes himself up in his room and begins drinking lots of grease. When he runs out he demands Yui get some more.









Her father comes to her rescue, hitting Goro with a frying pan and killing him. He apologizes, saying he had no choice.



Yui begins to have strange dreams of Mount Fuji erupting and spewing grease. Soon she starts to develop pimples of her own.









Her father's business is eventually closed, but the house only gets greasier. The saturation level is at 90% and grease falls from the ceiling like rain.

Comments

[zapbiffpow]

The clear winner here is that panel of Yui's brother pus-grating his face onto Yui. The clear loser here is the general reading public.

Also, it's neat how you manga allows abstract-ass endings like this! It's tough to pull off in Western comics - I read this Batman: Black and White short with an ending like that and it doesn't have the same punch.

[q99]

There's some indy comic anthologies that allow more for this kind of ambiguous ending, but yea.

[zapbiffpow]

Ayup. Emily Carroll's "His Face All Red" is a prime example, both for and against.

[cyberghostface]

It actually went over my head until someone pointed it out to me but the implication is he served the remains of his son at his restaurant and it was a big success which is why he tried to force-feed his daughter the grease and why he's hacking his foot off at the end.

[zapbiffpow]

Thanks! Did not know that. Ohhhh. And also eeewww.

[locuatico]

Lots of anthology comics did have endings like this one. Tales of the Crypt being the mos tnotewqorthy one.

[zapbiffpow]

True, but there's almost always like the Crypt-Keeper to act like as an obvious "And now the story is over!" signal to coddle the reader.

It's not just the abstractness of the conclusion that's morbidly appealing, it's the abrupt ending of the narrative - almost as if someone placed a 'the end' label pages before the actual conclusion, making the story infinitely more terrifying.

[lb_lee]

I just love how Junji Ito can draw simple images of clarity and almost innocence (like the opening Mt. Fuji panel) and also the most disgusting horrifying shit ever.

[reveen]

This is all a metaphor for why you should switch from vegetable oil to olive oil and consume monosaturated fats in moderation while avoiding saturated and trans fats.

[doctor_spanky]

Mt. Fuji looks like a big whitehead in that first panel

[kurenai_tenka]

I remember this one.

Which is why I refuse to read it again. XD